U.S. Ends Program for Central American Child Refugees

(Reuters/VOAnews) – The U.S. State Department will stop accepting new applications at midnight on Thursday for a program that allowed children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to apply for refugee status in the United States before leaving home.

In this July 12, 2014, file photo, a young migrant girl waits for a freight train to depart on her way to the U.S. border, in Ixtepec, Mexico.

President Donald Trump’s administration told Congress in September it would phase out the Central American Minors (CAM) program during the fiscal year 2018, which began on Oct. 1.

New applications will not be accepted after 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday (0459 GMT on Friday), the State Department said in a statement on Wednesday night.

FILE PHOTO: Migrants attend a workshop for legal advice following the U.S. government’s recent announcement it would step up deportations of Central Americans families that arrived since May 2014 when there was a surge of women and minors arriving from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, many fleeing drug gang violence, in south Chicago, Illinois, January 10, 2016. REUTERS/Joshua Lott/File Photo

The CAM program started at the end of 2014 under former President Barack Obama as a response to tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors and families from Central America who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum in the United States.

An executive order on border security signed by Trump days after he took office in January triggered a review of the program.

In its report to Congress, the Trump administration said it was ending CAM “because the vast majority of individuals accessing the program were not eligible for refugee resettlement.”

The government will instead focus on “more targeted” refugee processing in Central America, working with the government of Costa Rica, the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration, the report said.

As of Aug. 4, more than 1,500 children and eligible family members had arrived in the United States as refugees under the CAM program since it began in December 2014, according to the State Department. More than 13,000 people have applied for the program since it began, it said.

The decision to end the program comes the same week that the administration announced that it was ending the immigration benefits for nearly 2,500 Nicaraguan nationals living and working in the U.S. under a program called Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) gave the Nicaraguan TPS recipients 12 months after the Jan. 5 expiration of their protected status to arrange their affairs and either leave the country or obtain legal status through a different visa category.

Another 195,000 Salvadorans and 46,000 Haitians are awaiting the decision on their fate, as DHS must decide in coming weeks what to do with TPS recipients from those countries whose legal residency will expire early next year.